This invention relates to hedging techniques for exchange traded funds or similar basket products.
Exchange traded funds or basket products such as S&P 500 Depository Receipts (SPDRs) are vehicles for holding a basket of securities that can be traded on an exchange or securities market. More specifically, these instruments usually represent an undivided ownership interest in a portfolio of stocks or other securities held by a Trust. The portfolio of stocks is often intended to track the performance of an index like the S&P 500 Index, and therefore seeks to invest substantially all of its assets in the stocks comprising the S&P 500 index, in proportion to the relative weights of stocks in that index. SPDR shares are securities issued by the SPDR Trust and may be traded on a stock exchange or in over the counter transactions.
The intra-day pricing of such securities is determined by supply and demand. Typically, these SPDR fund shares may be created or redeemed at the end of each business day at a net asset value price in so called “creation units”. In the case of the SPDRs the creation unit has 50,000 SPDR fund shares. SPDR creation units are created or redeemed at the end of day net asset value through an in-kind transfer of securities corresponding to the S&P 500 index. While the official net asset value (NAV) of the SPDR Trust is only published at the close of every business day, the estimated value of the underlying S&P 500 index and the value of the creation basket are published continuously throughout each trading day. The per SPDR value of the index and/or the creation basket can be devised and distributed electronically to brokers, dealers, and investors throughout the world.
An intra-day value disseminated by the exchange is a real time calculation designed to give an investor a per share price which is very close to what the intraday net asset value would be, if it were calculated. At the end of trading, the intraday approximate calculation and the official NAV should be nearly identical.
Intraday values of exchange traded trusts such as SPDRs or mutual funds such as the Select Sector SPDRs may be evaluated from the publicly available creation basket or the index on a per share basis throughout the day as if the creation basket or the index were the portfolio of the fund. The calculation is relatively straight forward, since the creation basket composition changes little from day to day unless the index changes. While the fund may contain proportionately a few more shares of one stock and a few less of another stock than would be provided by multiplying the creation basket by the number of creation baskets that constitutes the fund, the calculation is very close to net asset value.
Trading on exchanges such as the America Stock Exchange involves a trader called a specialist. A specialist tries to match buy orders with sell orders in a manner that maintains an orderly market. Often specialists and market makers (who make markets for securities on exchanges or on electronic markets such as The Nasdaq Stock Market and who have obligations similar to but less demanding than those of the specialists to help maintain an orderly market) will have to take a contrary position to the prevalent position in the market by placing their own capital at risk. In securities markets, during the course of a trading day, there can be a net demand for a security, e.g., an exchange traded fund. Thus, over the course of a trading day, the specialist and any market makers trading the security can be selling more shares of a security than they are buying. In this situation, the specialist might buy components of the fund or derivatives based on the fund or on an underlying index in order to hedge its position. If the specialists and market makers have bought more shares of a security than they have sold, they might sell short components of the fund or associated derivatives to hedge their positions.